What Lisp webserver was used, originally? Hunchentoot? What web servers/stack are Lispers using these days?
At the time it was "TBNL" (http://weitz.de/tbnl/), which I believe has indeed evolved into Hunchentoot.
Rewriting Reddit (2005)
51–60 of 118 posts
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#52Just wondering (as someone who only uses/touches Python indirectly, through some projects that use it, but is not currently a 'Python developer' by any means); was this posted in response to some recent drama in the Django community, or as an argument against Lisp? I'm just wondering why it seems this story is quickly getting upvoted on the front page of HN, when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely…
A combination of an interesting essay that most haven't read, and the fact that it makes us remember Aaron Schwartz
Until I saw this I didn't even click that it was him.
Wow.
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure if linuxydave is joking, but for those not in on the joke, Hacker News is written in arc, a Lisp variant. Hacker News resembles early versions of reddit quite a bit and Reddit was a ycombinator funded startup. Early on there was a big overlap in the two communities, although Hacker News was quite a bit more exclusive and limited in scope.
I knew HN was written in Arc, but I wasn't aware that it is the Lisp clone referred to by this piece. Was it?
When he said "Whatever happened to that Lisp clone?" I'm pretty sure he was referring to the part of the article that mentions the folks on comp.lang.lisp who were discussing writing a competitor to Reddit in Lisp.
The discussion was not about writing a new Lisp or Lisp-like language, but a clone of Reddit.
The fact that HN is a site that performs a function very similar to Reddit, and happens to be written in a dialect of Lisp is completely coincidental :-D (unless there has been some comment by pg about his motivations for making HN that I missed, but I kind of doubt it).
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you guys know what they felt about Flask?
At the time that we switched to pylons and decided to punt django, flask didn't exist. I believe it was some time on '07 or '08. I'd check, but I also think it predates our switching to git from subversion... Personally I like flask a lot and it's come a long way. Also, when spez and I moved on to hipmunk we started using tornado.
The switch to Git happened one day before we open sourced on June 17, 2008, I remember that day well :) So yeah, the history of when we switched to Pylons is probably lost forever sadly. But yes it was right around when I started in March '07 that you guys started working on the transition.
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#55web.py never really worked well, so we ended up rewriting it again. The interesting thing was that Django still wasn't up to the task when we did that, mostly because it's templating engine was too slow. So we chose Pylons instead. It should be noted that Django has since fixed that issue.
Was there one specific problem with web.py or multiple issues? Was there ever a write up about what you guys learned from trying web.py? Would be an interesting read.
Keysersosa answered this better below, but basically maintainability. There was no writeup, I guess because doing write-ups about internal software switches wasn't really a thing back then. :)
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#56Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there one specific problem with web.py or multiple issues? Was there ever a write up about what you guys learned from trying web.py? Would be an interesting read.
Keysersosa answered this better below, but basically maintainability. There was no writeup, I guess because doing write-ups about internal software switches wasn't really a thing back then. :)
Yeah I think that post dates from a time where you still heard people refer to them as "weblogs".
Edit: Found it. It was the 14th post on our blog a time, but definitely light on the implementation details. http://www.redditblog.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#58They say hell hath no fury like a lisp fan scorned. I wonder if they hadn't been acquired, would they have still used Lisp ?
We switched to python about 4 months into the startup and a full year before getting acquired.
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#59Just wondering (as someone who only uses/touches Python indirectly, through some projects that use it, but is not currently a 'Python developer' by any means); was this posted in response to some recent drama in the Django community, or as an argument against Lisp? I'm just wondering why it seems this story is quickly getting upvoted on the front page of HN, when it seems there are no other frontpage stories remotely…
"was this posted in response to some recent drama in the Django community"
What drama?
Re: Rewriting Reddit (2005)
#60I think you can leverage these criticisms at about 90% of the framework software out there written in just about any language. Most developers like to create complex, complicated software mainly to show off their "cleverness" without thinking through the implications for the people that have to use it. It's as if they think that by cramming in every design pattern they can think of and using many different libraries…
And I think you can leverage THESE criticisms at about 90% of software out there written in just about any language.